Creating effective sales enablement has become more crucial than ever to achieve lasting and measurable impacts on revenue goals. According to LXA Hub, organizations that implement sales enablement achieve a 49% win rate on forecasted deals, compared to just 42.5% for those that don’t.* Over time, that's a lift that adds up.
Maybe you’re looking to build an effective sales enablement strategy or maybe you’re looking to make some improvements on your existing plan. No worries, we can help either way.
If you’re building your first-ever sales enablement strategy, here’s a quick refresh: Sales enablement, as defined by SalesForce, involves training your sales representatives on selling techniques and utilizing various tools such as content, coaching, and technology to enhance their skills. When executed effectively, this can result in increased productivity and a significant boost in sales.*
How can you make sure you’re doing this effectively? We’ve got you covered. Check out our 5 best practices for sales enablement.
Establish clear goals: Define specific objectives for your sales enablement program. Goals such as increasing win rates or reducing sales cycle times are good examples. By establishing clear, measurable goals, you can determine the effectiveness of your efforts post launch and make adjustments as needed.
Align sales and marketing: Ensure that sales and marketing teams are aligned and working together toward a common goal. This includes developing shared messaging and content, as well as collaborating on lead generation and qualification. Now, I understand that alignment on brand messaging can be tough to achieve across departments; I have a template to solve for that. Check out our Messaging and Positioning Framework template. This framework aligns leadership, sales, client services, and product teams and gives your marketing work a north star to aim for.
Put together your kit: Depending on your customer’s unique buying journey and the needs of your sales team, the exact contents of your kit should vary. But examples of classic sales enablement tools include: call scripts, pre-written emails, and objection-handling templates. It might help to include product sheets, one pagers, infographics, and slide decks. The point is to enable your team with all the pre-created content as they’ll need to seal their deals.
Provide ongoing training: Offer regular training and development opportunities for your sales team, including product knowledge, sales techniques, and industry trends. Consider, for instance, hosting a monthly meeting or sending an internal newsletter to your sales reps with the latest resources. This will keep them up to date and confident in their ability to engage with prospects.
Leverage technology: Utilize sales enablement technologies such as CRM systems, sales analytics, and sales enablement platforms, to automate processes, track performance, and provide real-time insights. Popular tools I’ve worked with and would recommend are Hubspot Sales Hub and Salesforce Enablement. Don’t underestimate the impact these tech tools can have. In fact, 55% of C-suite executives recognize sales enablement tools as the most important technology investment to increase sales productivity.*
Monitor performance: Remember those clear goals you set in step 1? Now it’s time to track performance against them. Monitor the effectiveness of your sales enablement program by tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) such as win rates, pipeline velocity, and sales cycle times. These KPIs can be used to identify areas ripe for improvement and inform the future iterations of your content and plan. With the help of a sales tool (like those stated in step 4), you’ll be able to build custom dashboards that can give you all the depth of reporting you would need.
And there you have it, my top tips for successful sales enablement. By implementing these strategies, you can train your sales reps to become more effective and efficient, leading to increased revenue and productivity for your organization.
If you're looking for more in-depth guidance on sales enablement, or if you have an existing sales enablement program that requires improvement, my team and I would be happy to chat.
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